Spend Time in Our Scary Place

What is The Nightmare Room?

The Nightmare Room is a young adult book series by R.L. Stine and a TV series that ran during the early 2000s. Both the books and series focus on common childhood fears, both ordinary and metaphysical: The TV introduction to the storyline is two siblings who move into a new home and discover their basement is haunted. Haunted by whom? The ghosts of children who were forgotten by their friends and family and who find new recruits by making the friends and family of living children forget about them.

You watch the TV episodes in particular and you see parallels to other cultural and artistic works. That pilot episode always reminded me of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, “Out of Mind, Out of Sight.” The types of universal themes echo throughout book “thrillogy” as well as the TV series.

Indeed, we here at TheNightmareRoom.com take an open-ended approach to horror stories and childhood nightmares. We love R.L. Stine, and we have fond memories of watching the TV series as kids, but we also love a bunch of other stuff in the horror genre, young adult fiction, regular adult cinema, and, you know, just good old-fashioned scary stories. In other words, if we post or say something about Stephen King, Anne Rice, Bram Stoker, or freaking Edgar Allan Poe, don’t write to us about how “that’s not The Nightmare Room.” We love the series just as much as the next person, and while this site will continue to come back to its original inspiration, it’s not just about The Nightmare Room. After all….

When the lights fade and the moon rises, anything can happen. The world becomes a carnival of shocks and chills. A whirling merry-go-round that never stops, spinning faster and faster, taking you on a frightening ride….

Again, what’s always been a favorite part of the frightening ride for us was that simple and universal presentation of fear that’s born and borne out of childhood. The fear gets corrupted and isolated in adulthood. Instead of ghosts and monsters and the dark, it’s not being good enough, not being thin enough, not being accomplished, not being wealthy enough, not being healthy enough, not being on time. It’s paying the bills and getting to the store and picking up the things. Everybody shares the same fears in a much rawer sense as children. And that’s what makes it so timeless and fun but scary and excited.